2ND LEAD (Adds details)

Mutturajawela swamp bodies identified

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 06 March 2007, 21:30 GMT]
Five bodies of male persons recovered from Mutturajawela swamp in Kandana police division Friday and Saturday have been identified as belonging to persons from Batticaloa district, a private electronic media reported Tuesday in the late night news bulletin quoting a police officer, G.Amaratunge, of Pamunugamuwa Police.

Relatives of the victims Batticaloa had come from Batticaloa and identified the bodies, the MTV-Sathi news 9:00 p.m broadcast said quoting the same police officer.

Kandana Police said that bodies belonged to:

• Arul Suresh, from Church Road, Batticaloa,
• Subramaniam Prabhakaran, from Ayithyamalai, Batticaloa
• Sivaprakash Mathiruban, from Kokkadichcholai, Batticaloa,
• Kandasamy Vellaiyan, from Batticaloa Town, and
• Ponniah Kamalkarthik, from Unnichchimalai, Batticaloa.

Meanwhile, postmortem examination of the bodies was conducted Tuesday afternoon at Ragama government hospital.

Mano Ganesan, Western Province People's Front parliamentarian and an active member of the Civil Monitoring Committee (CMC) on Abductions, Extrajudicial and Arbitrary Killings, appealed to the Judge to release the bodies to the relatives, legal sources said.

However, the five bodies recovered at Tirapane in Anuradhapura police division have not been identified till Tuesday evening. The bodies are lying in the mortuary of the Anuradhapura Story general hospital, media sources said.

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